She was the daughter of Jean de Lon, Sieur de Lorme, and became the lover of the poet and freethinker Jacques Vallée, Sieur des Barreaux. She soon left him, however, for Louis XIII’s young favourite, the Marquis de Cinq-Mars, whom she almost married. The fashionable salon she established in the Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges) in Paris attracted a number of leading literary and political figures. After Cinq-Mars was executed for treason (1642), she had many lovers, including the Duke d’Enghien (later known as the Great Condé), the skeptic Saint-Évremond, and the superintendent of finances Michel Particelli d’Émery. It was maliciously rumoured that she had had an affair with the powerful Cardinal de Richelieu, King Louis XIII’s chief minister. During the uprising known as the Fronde (1648–53), her salon became a meeting place for bourgeois and aristocratic rebels. Forced by the government to leave the Place Royale, she died in poverty. The 19th-century French writer Alfred de Vigny included her in his novel Cinq-Mars, and Victor Hugo made her a heroine of one of his dramas.

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series of civil wars in France between 1648 and 1653, during the minority of Louis XIV. The Fronde (the name for the “sling” of a children’s game played in the streets of Paris in defiance of civil authorities) was in part an attempt to check the growing power of royal...